Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. Happy Tears
    A contradictory creature, both insightful and dumb, sometimes innovative and sometimes just plain inept. Dreamy, funny but also weirdly disjointed, it’s as if the very film itself were stoned, just like its two pot-smoking sister protags.
  2. The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
    Feels larger in scope yet sorely lacking in originality.
  3. Pandorum
    Special effects are none too convincing, while sound effects are of the cheaply jolting variety favored by producer Paul W.S. Anderson in his films as director ("Resident Evil," "Event Horizon"). Other tech credits are, like the pic as a whole, lazily derivative.
  4. Transylmania
    Fangs aside, it sticks with the same basic menu of T&A and lowbrow humor.
  5. Antichrist
    Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.
  6. Amelia
    What rankles most about Amelia is the timidity and lack of imagination with which Nair approaches one of America's most exceptional and intriguing celebrity life stories.
  7. Away We Go
    Emerges as an oddly sour, unappealing road-trip scenario.
  8. Miss March
    Miss March is overall a raggedy, unfocused affair that wastes both directors' acting talent and feels like too much work between the laughs.
  9. Death at a Funeral
    This slavishly faithful update... fails to tap into anything culturally specific or uniquely funny in its Pasadena setting or its theoretically looser, livelier black cast. And because the characters are so flat, we couldn't care less about the blows to their sense of propriety.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Solitude
    Despite good thesping, particularly from Belton, it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to spend time with this trio.
  11. Alone in the Dark
    Fans of the source material probably won't be switching platforms to catch this bizarre Lions Gate pickup, and non-fans definitely won't.
  12. Son of the Mask
    The net result is a truly numbing experience.
  13. Bigger Than the Sky
    Unconvincing poser.
  14. Be Cool
    A staggeringly flat sequel that trades filmdom for the music bizbiz and could hardly be less cool.
  15. King's Ransom
    An innocuous abduction of viewers' time, if nothing else, King's Ransom is an appealingly cast but terminally bland farce.
  16. Dead & Breakfast
    Offers plenty of splat with its slapstick. But this strenuous zombie yukfest is no more sophisticated than its nail-on-head title -- making it a joke no smarter than the movies it riffs on.
  17. Death of a Dynasty
    The execution is so amateurish and the script so witless the filmmakers appear to be having a far better time than the audience.
  18. Monster-in-Law
    Shrill, undermotivated, feature-length catfight.
  19. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    Rude, crude and, uh, cosmopolitan, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo waves the flag for R-rated politically incorrect studio comedy but doesn't top the laugh ratio of the first Deuce misadventure.
  20. The Chumscrubber
    An insufferable, self-conscious cult movie, The Chumscrubber smugly heaps on half-baked ideas about media violence, the homogeneity of suburbia and the disintegration of the American family.
  21. Chaos
    Chaos may not quite be "the most brutal, horrifying film ever made," as its garish ads promote. But it does contain moments as thoroughly sickening as any in Herschell Gordon Lewis' or Lucio Fulvi's bloody exploiters.
  22. Now & Forever
    A preposterously convoluted and exasperatingly sappy saga.
  23. Dirty Deeds
    A dispiritingly lazy high school comedy.
  24. Matando Cabos
    A perfect example of the sad trend in contempo Latin American filmmaking to imitate old Tarantino with only a fraction of the stylistic cojones, frantic comedy dealing with two pairs of confused guys and one pair of kidnap victims is an empty exercise that loses its juice before first reel's end.
  25. Underclassman
    So far-fetched as to make "Kindergarten Cop" look comparatively austere.
  26. Dear Wendy
    Well made but unlikable and dramatically absurd picture.
  27. Little Manhattan
    Resting almost entirely on the shoulders of its young leads, both they and the pic lack the sparkle to sustain what seeks to be a whimsical premise but, except for a few moments, proves ponderous instead.
  28. I Love Your Work
    Wallow in Hollywood hipster self-absorption.
  29. Niagara Motel
    A blue chip cast is wasted in the painfully unfunny ensemble comedy Niagara Motel.
  30. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    Japanese horror doesn't get more tedious.
  31. Big Momma's House 2
    So episodic and flat it should be a letdown even to those amused by the original.
  32. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    Though it's decidedly for perverse palates, some kind of cult audience seems assured for this one-note onslaught, which exercises a bizarre fascination despite its excesses.
  33. The King
    The story of a veritable devil who comes to test and destroy a family of faith, The King is a noxious film morally and an aggravating one dramatically.
  34. Land of the Blind
    One of the more spectacular misfires of recent years, Land of the Blind's lack of originality is only slightly exceeded by its failure to work as political satire.
  35. Little Man
    There are probably some moviegoers who can laugh at the sight of a groin-punching, breast-grabbing baby, possibly even find it cute. Everyone else should steer clear of Little Man, which welds Marlon Wayans' head to a diminutive body double, offering up the creepiest bigscreen dwarf since the last David Lynch movie.
  36. Pulse
    A dumbed-down remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's disturbingly abstract Japanese horror film.
  37. Zoom
    This tepid comic-bookish comedy should zip through its theatrical run faster than a speeding bullet. It likely won't perform much more superheroically in ancillary venues.
  38. The L.A. Riot Spectacular
    A comedy that's vulgar, disturbing, distasteful and violent, but so is injustice and civil unrest.
  39. The Quiet
    A Lifetime movie on crack, The Quiet dredges up every lurid cliche from the well of teen hormonal havoc in a tale of dysfunctional family meltdown that seems unsure whether to push for suburban-Gothic psychosexual excess or tongue-in-cheek malevolence.
  40. Surviving Eden
    A flighty and unnecessary send-up of reality television.
  41. Crossover
    Overshadowed by vastly superior sports movies like Invincible and hardly disguising its low-budget sources, pic isn't in any kind of shape for the theatrical leagues.
  42. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
    Liebesman hews close to the 2003 pic’s bile-tinged snuff-film aesthetic. His approach falls somewhere between the overwrought sadism of the “Saw” series and the giddy gore-for-gore’s-sake energy of “The Devil’s Rejects,” sharing those films’ twisted notion that today’s auds are willing to embrace such homicidal maniacs as heroes.
  43. Tideland
    Dragged down by a sputtering script and torpid pacing. Way too disturbing for kids and too weird for most grown-ups.
  44. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    A shake 'n' bake Brit teen-spy actioner, without a smidgeon of originality, humor or involving characterization, Stormbreaker is a high-profile bust.
  45. Color of the Cross
    Once the revisionist frisson of a black Jesus, not to mention Mary, Joseph and Judas, has worn off, one is stuck with more mundane matters such as story dynamics, visual style and character verisimilitude, much to the misfortune of the audience.
  46. Night of the Living Dead 3D
    A juiceless quasi-remake of George Romero's 1968 classic that, cardboard glasses aside, brings absolutely nothing new to the party.
  47. Deck the Halls
    A lifeless, workmanlike comedy conceived to provide holiday shoppers an inoffensive respite from the mall.
  48. Sun Kissed
    Without the songs, the underdeveloped bisexual triangle would seem shapeless. Even with the music, the film is a poorly crafted grab-bag of ideas barely elaborated upon enough to sustain a 20-minute short.
  49. Epic Movie
    If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, big studio Hollywood hitmakers should consider themselves lauded to the max in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Selzer's Epic Movie, the latest (and epically unfunny) entry in the movie parody franchise.
  50. Norbit
    Murphy's story lacks even the basic form that held most of "The Nutty Professor" together.
  51. Reno 911!: Miami
    All of which goes to demonstrate that while it's easy enough to slap a colon on a lowbrow cable TV show, additional punctuation by itself isn't sufficient to actually transform it into a movie.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    Only those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics.
  53. Caffeine
    Nonsense, hysterics and many cuppas spill in Caffeine, an ensembler that serves up a menu's worth of forced and trite situations.
  54. What Love Is
    Picture looks and sounds like an Off Off Broadway play.
  55. The Hawk Is Dying
    Already gasping for breath in its opening scenes, picture takes two bleak, unyielding hours to finally expire.
  56. Perfect Stranger
    A disorienting cocktail of illogic and hysteria that requires an 11th-hour soliloquy just to explain what's happened.
  57. The Condemned
    Picture aims for nonstop thrill ride, but for all its brainless brawn, it has plenty of stops and few real thrills.
  58. The Tripper
    A mostly dull-blade exercise that offers little to think or scream about.
  59. Kickin It Old Skool
    An inauspicious feature debut for director Harv Glazer and all three scenarists, the "Big"-meets-breakdancing comedy will be kickin' it to ancillary by swimsuit season.
  60. The Far Side of Jericho
    Far too aggressively seamy (and ferociously foul-mouthed) to please diehard fans of traditional sagebrush sagas, this misfire offers nothing in the way of wit, innovation or even marquee allure to interest auds accustomed to edgier revisionist oaters.
  61. L'iceberg
    A brave but doomed attempt to revive the art of pure physical comedy, the willfully eccentric, practically dialogue-free, Iceberg sets itself a high standard with an opening 15 minutes of the most delicious slapstick, but thereafter only a few moments of gentle surrealism and the occasional poetic image justify the ride, with only 10% of the pic's potential laughs evident above the surface.
  62. Linda Linda Linda
    This aimless, lifeless time-killer about four teenage girls prepping for their rock-band gig in a school talent show proves entirely the wrong choice.
  63. Georgia Rule
    No offense to either of them, but Georgia Rule suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone's going to be hit with a pie.
  64. DOA: Dead or Alive
    So insubstantial that it practically evaporates on screen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Nancy Drew
    Purportedly an attempt to modernize the young detective's adventures for a new generation of tweens, the pic instead serves up stale mystery-movie cliches and overcooked red herrings in a thoroughly wooden adaptation.
  66. License to Wed
    Pic is at best a relatively harmless way to enjoy air conditioning for those who admire Williams' ability to riff, even at his most irritating.
  67. I Know Who Killed Me
    Much like the ongoing real-world meltdown of its troubled star, Lindsay Lohan, I Know Who Killed Me is a disaster that exerts a perverse fascination.
  68. Daddy Day Camp
    This sequel to the 2003 Eddie Murphy comedy may appeal to auds still young enough not to have seen it all before, or who still find flatulence hilarious, or who think adults, when agitated, flail about like epileptic marionettes.
  69. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Has the unmistakable look and feel of a micro-budget indie produced for a small circle of friends, many of whom are listed in the credits.
  70. Halloween (2007)
    Leaves nothing to the imagination: Michael Myers is always right there in plain sight, committing mayhem sans suspenseful buildup or mystique.
  71. Trade
    Little more than a slipshod, trashy, sometimes exploitative thriller.
  72. The Comebacks
    An exceptionally lame genre parody that plumbs depths of ineptitude heretofore charted only by the marginally less abysmal "Date Movie."
    • Variety
  73. Southland Tales
    Rarely has a picture been so self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, and fallen so woefully short, as Southland Tales.
  74. The Air I Breathe
    Stellar thesps gamely strive to elevate the one-note material, but gravity ultimately defeats them in this relentless downer.
  75. Witless Protection
    If you need a GPS unit to find your own backside, you'll be laughing uproariously at Witless Protection, a movie that's far more interesting politically than dramatically -- or, God knows, comically.
  76. Chapter 27
    Jared Leto gained some 70 pounds. Seemingly following his lead, the pic itself is heavy, lethargic, and exasperating.
  77. Sex and Death 101
    A promising concept is gradually run into the ground in Sex and Death 101, a would-be black comedy that lacks both laughs and gravity.
  78. Frontier(s)
    Can a movie be an adrenalin-fueled, blood-gushing thrill ride and still be as boring as dirt? Apparently. The French answer to "Hostel" and "Saw" -- Frontier(s) is a 100-minute hemorrhage that doesn't bring anything to the operating table of torture-porn but more gore, cruelty and misery.
  79. Hancock
    The effects are snazzy, even if they pass by quite quickly, and there's enough going on to keep audiences watching, if not entirely happy. Smith, Theron and Bateman capably handle the main roles, but such is the skimpiness of the scenario that no further characters make any impact.
  80. Miss Conception
    Miscast and miscalculated, Miss Conception hopes to collect on Hollywood's recent baby-on-board craze, delivering instead the least credible take on human pregnancy since Arnold Schwarzenegger gave birth in "Junior."
  81. The Promotion
    A stillborn would-be comedy.
  82. Two Tickets to Paradise
    Utterly drab and desperate for laughs.
  83. Beer for My Horses
    A '70s-style redneck romp aimed at folks who felt intellectually challenged by the complex narrative stratagems of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo."
  84. Hell Ride
    All this sounds like a surefire recipe for knowing, trashy fun, but something got burnt in the oven.
  85. Death Race
    As hard as metal and just as dumb, Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race couldn't be further from producer Roger Corman and director Paul Bartel's goofy, bloody 1975 original, "Death Race 2000."
  86. The Spirit
    Plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air.
  87. Mirrors
    Softcore horror at best, failed allegory at worst, Mirrors reflects little beyond Splat Pack auteur Alexandre Aja's desire to push his genre into less punishing and more profitable territory.
  88. Hounddog
    An indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, biblical hash and thoroughly unpalatable spice.
  89. Igor
    With its belabored gags, misfired pop-culture references and garish visuals crammed together like so many disjointed body parts, this manic kidpic cranks up the annoy-o-meter early on and rarely lets up.
  90. Max Payne
    Stylishly made, armed to the teeth and ludicrous in the extreme.
  91. An American Carol
    Conservatives score a few political points but aren't very funny in An American Carol, a cheesy spitball directed at the very large target of a Michael Moore-like filmmaker.
  92. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    Cleverly titled but noxious British comedy.
  93. Crossing Over
    The way the picture dwells almost exclusively on cinematically exploitable elements -- gangbanger crime, prostitution, honor killing, terrorism paranoia -- gives it a sordid patina that even the classy, able thesps can't offset.
  94. The Lodger
    What needed to be a taut, structurally sound psychothriller instead malfunctions from the start.
  95. Bride Wars
    A shrill, mechanical comedy.
  96. New in Town
    It doesn't help that Zellweger, in an unfortunate attempt to make the aud appreciate her character's uptightness, spends many of the early scenes moving about as stiff as a flagpole in January.
  97. The Objective
    With a low-budget look, cliched dialogue, a stale plot and so-so acting, this supernatural thriller is unlikely to achieve the phenomenal success of its fabled predecessor.
  98. The Perfect Sleep
    Unfortunately, Alter's often inventive work is kneecapped by a deliriously nonsensical script, which misses the mark as both over-the-top parody and straight-faced homage, and could have been intended as either.
  99. Land of the Lost
    The result is a movie with an exceedingly narrow target audience that should test Will Ferrell's appeal among boys maybe ages 12-14 -- about the only demo likely able to endure this laborious mess.
  100. Downloading Nancy
    On a moment to moment basis, however, picture continuously skirts very close to the ludicrous in its advanced-stage grimness and outre forms of torture foreplay.
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